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Unless you’ve spent the past few months
under a rock — one not associated with the much-ballyhooed Utica shale formation — you know that
Ohio appears to be on the brink of on oil-and-gas boom.

As
The Dispatch reported a week ago, state officials have issued 27 permits for horizontal
drilling along the subterranean formation in the past three months.

That represents close to two-thirds of all such permits the state has issued since, well — since
the sediment and organic material that make up the shale settled to the floor of the Appalachian
Basin more than 450 million years ago.

Experts predict that the Utica formation, which now lies several thousand feet underground, will
prove to be one of the richest deposits of oil and gas ever found.

The geological treasure-trove spans 170,000 square miles beneath eight states and parts of
Ontario, but Ohio’s portion alone could produce 200,000 jobs and $14 billion in income by 2015,
according to the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.

Clearly, the Utica formation and the adjacent Marcellus formation — a slightly smaller,
shallower cousin — could yield enormous paydays for the drilling companies that draw out the hidden
reserves, for the refineries that process the resulting oil and gas, and for the pipeline operators
that deliver the finished products to consumers nationwide.

But those businesses — the
rock stars, if you will, of the U.S. energy industry — won’t be the only winners. They’ll
be joined, of course, by the hundreds of lower-profile companies, large and small, that make the
equipment needed to retrieve, refine and relay the precious earthborn commodities.

Take, for example, Ariel Corp., headquartered in Mount Vernon. The Knox County company is a
leading manufacturer of high-speed reciprocating and rotary screw compressors, which play integral
roles in the oil-and-gas industry.

Simply put, Ariel’s machines keep things moving.

Jim Buchwald and two associates scraped together $10,500 to start the company 45 yeas ago.

His daughter, Karen Buchwald Wright, has served as CEO of the privately held firm since 2001,
when she bought out her younger brother. Under her leadership, the company has grown to 1,200
employees who, together, crank out more than 3,500 compressors a year.

Wright, a 57-year-old divorced mother of four sons, reflected on Ariel’s rather humble beginning
— and its very promising future — with Mike Kallmeyer, host of ONN-TV’s
Ohio Means Business. An edited excerpt:

Q: The company started, I believe, in your dad’s basement?

A: Yes, in 1966, my dad had a design contract with a company in California, and a couple of
friends of his said he should look at designing a small, high-speed compressor. And so he did go
about doing that.

Several people said, “Well, we want to see a real one — not just a design.” So he and his
partner decided they would build a prototype.

Because Cooper-Bessemer was on the North Side of town — it also made compressors, but old-style,
slow-speed (models) — my dad and his partner, Jim Doane, had to be sort of surreptitious. They
worked in the basement. They even put paper over the windows.

Q: Flash forward a few decades: You’re still making compressors based on your father’s original
prototype?

A: Yes. Of course, if you don’t innovate and continue to design new things, you’ll fall
behind. So we gradually added to our product line.

Now, we are the biggest manufacturer of natural-gas compressors in the world — right here in
Mount Vernon. We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,000 compressors out there operating
everywhere in the world where there is oil and gas. The company has become pretty much — well, not
pretty much — it is the industry leader in this particular business ...

The bulk of our compressors are used in wellhead (systems): When natural gas comes out of the
ground, it’s a gas. And so, what you do is, you use a compressor that squishes the gas down to a
higher pressure inside the cylinder and pushes it through a pipe to somewhere else.

So you go from the wellhead to your house — where you use it in your gas stove or to heat your
house.

Q: Worldwide, anyone in the oil-and-gas industry — they know Ariel.

A: Yes, yes they do — definitely.

Q: You’re very proud of that.

A: It’s pretty neat. This is a really good example of American entrepreneurial spirit. Really,
only in America can this happen — where someone who is nobody can design something and be
successful at it, against all odds, basically.

You know, there were a lot of big companies in this business that said: “Pooh-pooh you, little
Ariel. You’re never going to be anything.” Well, they’re all gone, actually — and here we are.

Q: What’s next?

A: Today, what’s amazing is — and this is a huge game changer — because of the Marcellus shale
and the Bakken shale (in Montana and North Dakota) — oil and gas, not just gas — the United States
could be energy independent. Really, truly.

Every president for the last 40 years has yapped about it, but we really could be, because we
have so much (untapped energy). I mean, we’re awash in it. The Utica shale that you’ve been reading
about — I mean, it’s astonishing how much there is.